cessation she was heard talking to Crow's Nest over the
phone. She gave orders to the sanitarium that Professor Benson should
be brought down to Cragsnook for a ride late that afternoon, as the
girls would not go up there that day. Besides, Mrs. Dunbar was
declaring, the ride would do him good.

"Oh, won't that be lovely!" and Mary almost danced out of her glumps.
"Just think of Grandie here!"

"Now, Mary-love, you promised some of Reda's news. Do tell us before
something else happens to put off all our delicious mysteries,"
implored Madaline, quite as if the telling would give the same joy to
Mary as the news would furnish to herself.

"What did she want to warn you of?" prompted Grace.

"Oh, Janos and his men. They were coming out here to take all
Grandie's orchids away. And they brought the monkey to scare him. He
was dreadfully frightened of a monkey once in the tropics, and Janos
knew it, so he just planned that awful trick on him----"

"With our lovely little Boxer! How perfectly absurd," exclaimed Grace,
at the risk of spoiling all the thrilling story Mary had undertaken to
tell them.

"Yes," went on Mary, "and the night you girls came, that first night,
you remember?"

"Yes, when I turned on the lights," inserted Madaline.

"That was the night they first planned to scare Grandie's secret from
him. They were all three out in that orchid room, just waiting to
break in and--oh, I can't say what they were going to do to get
Grandie's secret from him." She was now on the verge of sobbing, and
the girls had no idea of letting any such thing occur.

"But Madaline turned the tables," Cleo said cheerily, "and she shooed
off the--desperate thieves!" and Cleo again reverted to type as a
fiction fixer.

"And the really cruel part of it all was," continued Mary, "Grandie did
not know and does not know yet what became of the treasure they are all
seeking. He lost it with his memory," she said almost in a whisper.
"And it was daddy's just as I was his. I was to be given mother's
family with the treasure as a peace offering."

"What was it?" asked Cleo. "Can you tell us now, Mary-love?" she asked
gently.

"Yes, Grandie said I might tell you now, for he does not fear things as
he did before he went to the sanitarium. He has recovered courage,
which was simply clogged up in his congested mind. Yes, he said I
might tell you now that he lost the most famous orchid in the world,
the 'Spiranthes Corale.